happy holidays!

the care paradox

sisters hair salon price list
harlem, new york, december 4, 2010

the president's walk

(image courtesy of AFP)

no amount of foot prints
paper trails
sound bites
camera angles
or conjectures
could explain
or describe
our president's walk.
the times' irregular
heartbeat captured
or released?

mirror, mirror, in the heavens...

the story we like to tell ourselves about the size of kanye's ego might not be entirely sound. whatever the ego might turn out to be, it has been pushed to the backseat in a manner so welcome that it seems to have already hired a decorator. we live in an age where the cult of personality (others' and one's own) has been replaced by the cult of the fan. but the fan has no face, name, pulse or ego. the fan is an impure abstraction and one that refuses to be concretized. take the case of kanye-- with so many infractions (of art and decorum) setting the blogosphere abuzz it is increasingly hard to imagine whose face his work sets aglow. it is easy, of course, to imagine a mass of bland, texted out, ethically and aesthetically challenged youth bowing down to the ones that purportedly serve them. and yes, it is not in imagination only that kanye has sold so many records, graced so many stages and magazine covers. but there is a twist here to the old story of bread and spectacle: while in the not-so-distant past our stars were tutoring us how to become stars, nowadays people like kanye west are teaching us how to be fans. this reversal is due to what could be called "the internet exemption," or in a nutshell, the belief that everything has already been done and it is out there and the true artist is just a fine editor. this belief is the last thing you will hear confessed to by any "artist," but is implicit in the new ethics of creation and appropriation.
kanye is a special case because he comes from the world of hip hop, a culture whose early beginnings were gleefully, and ingeniously, disrespectful of copyright restrictions. on the other hand, however, his method of appropriation is voraciously ecumenical-- no area of creativity is spared the scissors of this particular regurgitator. this may be almost as offensive to our pre-internet idea of original art as it sure is to our pre-internet idea of original editorial work. riding on the internet exemption is this new brand of artist, the producer-turned-blogger-turned-designer-turned-musician-turned-singer(?)-turned-director-while-all-the-while-having-at-all-times-been-a-pain. such branding is useful and significant in that it lays bare the simplistic fantasy that exposure (to others and to information) equals accomplishment.
and this is how kanye gets to make "runaway," a short film or a half-hour-too-long music video to accompany a new record release. in it, one is invited to gorge on a sleek color aesthetic, a naggingly discrepant soundtrack ostensibly quilted from the future release, and a haphazard non-story about inter-species love, interstellar collisions and interpersonal discord. everything the viewer registers owes its claim to our attention to other things we have already been exposed to. at best, the film is a superb work of indiscriminate derivation. there is so much to enjoy visually (a feather-clad lingerie model being one of the lesser joys amongst extravagant ballerina formations, empty high-modernist spaces and domesticated does) that it is made difficult to care about coherence, story-telling or musical background. and that is only a part of the problem--not realizing the primacy of sight over all other senses suggests a missed connection of a larger kind, i.e. between operatic ambition and opera. kanye obviously likes all things in his film but he seems to even more strongly like us to like them. the loop of fragmentary gestures of thumbs up or no thumbs at all closely resembles the alternations of zeroes and ones onto the tape of a turing machine. the more likes the better. kanye is really his own best fan not because of egomaniacal artistic confidence but because he can't help embracing the culture that birthed him. ultimately, his only available shot at stardom is by being a loyal fan.

the virtues of spelling

andicap entrance

bleecker street, nyc, october 20, 2010

the wagon-wheel effect

the wagon-wheel effect:
an optical infraction whereby
intermittent light renders the motion of a wheel's spokes
slower, in reverse or non-existent.
you (fail to) see it in the movies.
what one can never see in the movies
is the thread count of fabric,
the physical distance between fibers woven together,
the empty space of a scarf.
that's where isadora duncan is rumored to reside--
at the cross section of inconstant light
and uncounted threads.

sweet crude

the speed at which oil fills up the space

is greater than that of a six year old reaching up for air:

some truths take showing.

miami: an acquired lack of taste

the threshold

flower and fish patterned umbrella. all the way to the sea, even though just by virtue of the number of countries it is surrounded by the mediterranean should be considered an ocean. in experiencing signs of infinity we invariably commit the same mistake- we turn a spatial model into a temporal one and vice versa. which is why now, as i dip my head below these greek ripples and look ahead at something that vaguely resembles a kaleidoscopic underwater horizon, i feel as if i am touching some kind of infinity. wrong. it is only my well-trained capacity to spin magic out of nothing, to milk the maximum deviation out of the mundane and then enthrone everything deviant as the threshold to a parallel reality. i only wish i were looking at some kind of infinity right now. instead, i am peeking under the skirt of coastal greece, all of which turns out to be coastal.

make believe

finding pearls without looking for them

borderline case

le penseur

purple poaching

the great emotional swindle

i tore through a sail
i find life intoxicating

i capture the threshold between former battlefields and future movie sets

the cherry orchard

walk to the left around the house

step through the wet grass up a slight incline

locate the tree

pick two cherries

beware of bees...

crossing the gulf

only occasionally is there a glass to separate the child from the world, the side known from that unexplored, the hand from the oven, the water from the oil, the benign from the harmful. so much the better, then, for arbitrary gestures, unbound desire, calamitous alloys, and danger-- pure, magnificent, instructive...

unscripted codas

neatly, almost as if she is being guided by the invisible hands of special effects manipulators, she opens her blouse to reveal a bosom as uncanny as it is natural. the earth does not experience emotion--
she just provides the setting for it; the sine qua non of emotion and indeed life...

"sitting here wishing on a cement floor"

omni vorous

omni sexual

omni directional

omni potent

omni emotional

omni technical

omni scient

present

safe from harm, at long last

a fighter bull thunders past the wordless black marquee
in slow motion-
ancient wounds gaping heavenward
horns bent, or crooked if you're a pessimist
breathing without exhaling
as if oxygen times time equals momentum
for a moment it looks like the beast isn't moving-
suspended in space somewhere above the stage
hoisted by fatigue, or fulfillment if you're an optimist
it is a long moment
the sound thunders past the bull and onto the crowd
in slow motion-
safe from harm, at long last...

model behavior

"there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." sir francis bacon, on beauty

junior citizens (atoms for peace, april 5, 2010, roseland ballroom)

everything in its right tone: bumping into zoe kravitz on the way in, rearing into david byrne at the bar, watching antony hegarty negotiate the v.i.p. terrace. and then the dissection of an album. chamberworks simmering with schizophrenic funk. smells like weed. someone keeps calling over the crowd: "come over, troy, i love you and i don't want you to miss this!" an exercise in rhythmic voracity. we are never hungry for less...

the shooter gets shot

soho, new york city, april 1, 2010

by grayson dantzic

absurdity's elbow

semi-gently. BUT. fairly, elegantly. christopher wAlken em-bra-ces and diSPELLs the stereo. types of the clinically in(sane), the murderOUS. the villa-in-ous; the race-ist? The honor=able. all parTs of the human con+di+tion in one brisk sweep of THE HAND. or, maybe? the el-bough...

nothing learned?

"Even before this latest case, the European sexual-abuse scandal had deeply damaged the church’s reputation in the pope’s home country, Germany. The congregations in Bad Tölz and in Garching an der Alz, where Father Hullermann worked for 21 years, responded with shock and anger, but also with a strong defense for a priest lauded for his approachability, good humor and ability to connect with parishioners on everyday issues."
the new york times, march 15, 2010

(stay there)

jump up in the air (stay there)

erykah badu

subjective velocity

in the shadow of orozco's mobile matrix
a different kind of mobility--
the great white space
whose language only children speak...

pigeonholed

pigeonholed

west 33rd st, new york

01/31/10

go slow

just when you think it's all taken care of--
the car is safely parked, five dozen minutes have rounded up an hour, the wind's arrows have pierced through the cigarette smoke--there comes a song that beckons you to
go slow...

mysterious object / aurora

http://news.discovery.com/space/aurora-mystery-solved.html

up sprang dionysus

there seem to be so many ways of getting from A to B...

(gun-hoof shoes optional)

optical truth

kinetic sunset

upper west side, december 22, 2009

new year gift

broken record, she's a lady
clinton hill, brooklyn, 01/01/10